Immediate Disclaimer about the headline of this article: 1. I do NOT like Mitt Romney, only that I think he would be a better president than Santorum (a man who has no equal in ignorance and hypocrisy). 2. I do NOT think Santorum would be a better president, merely a better candidate.
To explain further: If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to pick either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum to be the next president of the United States, I guess I would have to pick Mitt Romney. Fortunately (but unfortunately for the Romney campaign), I don’t have to pick solely between those two. I can pick Barack Obama and am going to proudly, so which candidate I think is more appealing—-even though I won’t vote for either one—-won’t help the GOP buy a cup of coffee. And as I’ve written about in previous articles, who ever liberals like slightly better (and Romney is certainly that) is usually the guy who loses, as the presidential race has become less about who’s the most “moderate,” and more about who has the bigger base that they can motivate to show up in droves.
Whether we like it or not, the presidential race is really only going to be decided by nine states this year. These are the states that aren’t solidly red (my home state of Alabama) or solidly blue (my adoptive home of New York), and I think it really says something that there’s only nine of them. They are Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Iowa. [By the way, Obama won ALL of these states last time.]
Now we could talk all day long about whether ANY of these states are truly “purple states” (I’ve also written before that N.C., Virginia, and Florida are pure red states that somehow went for Obama last time) and that it would be nothing short of a miracle for Obama to hold onto any of the Southeastern-States-that-Think-They’re-Not-Southern-States this time around. [Plus, heavily Mormon and mostly racist Nevada an “undecided” state with Mormon Romney against a black guy? I don’t think so.] But he doesn’t really have to.
He could lose nearly all of those states, pick up Ohio and Pennsylvania and still win a second term. Not to mention that right now he’s beating Romney in nearly all of those states including a couple that Romney should be trouncing him in. And it’s hard to imagine that Romney (a candidate with a horrible personality and zero blue collar appeal, a man who routinely sticks his foot in his mouth as if it’s made of steak) will actually grow on people as the race slogs into the Fall. [It’s also hard to buy the logic that Santorum would say too many stupid things to get elected, as that never stopped Bush, and Romney won’t be known as “The Great Communicator” either.]
In contrast, Santorum was/is a much better candidate to play in those “swing” states. He could motivate the blue-collar vote in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, and even Pennsylvania (the only state besides Colorado that I’m nearly certain Romney will lose to Obama). If he motivated enough—-and I’m reasonably sure he could have—-to win even half those states, he’d be the next president.
But now a large chunk of the voters he would have brought will probably stay at home, reasoning, as I’ve heard before, that “having Romney ain’t much different than ‘ole Hussein Obama in the White House.” Put a different way, Santorum looks like the kind of guy who gets the blue-collar vote, and Romney looks like the guy who just repossessed their house and outsourced their factory.